


Moonlight

by smarter



Category: Bob's Burgers (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Set in highschool, the rating might change in the future
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-05 14:10:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21209846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarter/pseuds/smarter
Summary: Tina was always overly ambitious, which made being her science partner both a good and bad thing.





	1. Compromise & Fries

"Here you go T-Bird." Zeke set down the biggest iced coffee humanly possible in front of Tina, who was currently deeply engrossed in her laptop at a table in her dad's restaurant, as he sat down next to her with his own reasonably sized blended coffee.

She took a quick sip of the coffee, letting out a quick "Thanks," without so much as a glance upwards. Coffee was really the only thing that ever got her attention when she was in the zone.

"What is she working on now?" His question was pointed across the table at Louise and Gene.

"All I know is," Louise started as she grabbed another pair of ketchup bottles to marry, "if she worked on her schoolwork half as much as she writes her dumb fanfiction, she probably wouldn't be a _disappointment_ to this family and wouldn't be _failing math_."

Gene got up to grab another stack of napkins. "The real disappointment is how bad she is at restocking the napkins. I mean," he pauses to push a handful of napkins in its respectful holder, "look how hard that was!"

After a quick click on her laptop, Tina closed the lid and glared at her brother. "First of all, you know very well you owe me for covering for you the other night when you ditched work to take out _Tammy_ of all people. Second of all, I'm not failing math- I'm passing with a solid D, thank you very much." She shrugged, taking a long sip of her drink.

"How could I turn down the opportunity to take out a senior? A _SENIOR_, Tina. That's almost guaranteed ass."

There was a collective groan from the table. Everyone knew Gene was most definitely still a virgin, but that didn't stop him from lying about it. Whether or not Tammy Larsen put out was not up for debate, Gene never went pass third base.

"She's not worth it Gene," Zeke responded with a knowing look, "_Trust_ me."

Tina coughed and set down her drink, eager to change the subject. Zeke's colorful past with Tammy was the last thing she wanted to talk about. "When is Jimmy coming over? We'd better get started on our project if I'm ever gonna stop being a disappointment to the family."

Zeke ran a hand through his hair, "Actually, Ms. Sanderson got with him after class. He's pairing up with the new girl, Amanda something-or-other."

Tina shrugged. "Less cooks." She took another swig of her coffee before opening her laptop, turning it slightly so Zeke could see the screen while she navigated her open windows. "So I'm thinking everybody's go-to is going to be just the Galilean moons, so we should focus on something different. Like," Tina quickly glanced at an intrigued Zeke before clicking the window containing the rough outline of her idea for their science project.

"What am I looking at?" All he could see was a bunch of colorful circles all lined up from biggest to smallest. There must've been a hundred because the scroll bar on the side of the screen looked like it went on for a while.

"It's all the moons in our Solar System." Tina stated, as if it was as obvious as night and day.

"Oh!" Suddenly the circles looked familiar, like the lectures were hiding in his subconscious and he only just remembered. "Well how is that different then, you've got all the Galilean moons right here."

Tina rolled her eyes. "_All_ the moons in our Solar System, Zeke. From biggest to smallest."

"I don't understand. What are you proposing? You know we only have a week to do this, right?" Zeke raised an eyebrow at her. Tina was always overly ambitious, which made being her science partner both a good and bad thing. They hardly ever finished a project on time, especially with JJ around. He wasn't going to be around to encourage procrastination this time though, so Zeke was hoping for some promise. This initial idea had him worried, however.

Tina considered his words, biting her lip as she looked at her list. Zeke always wanted to do the least amount of work. Actually, both Jimmy and Zeke did the least. Tina was always the one pulling all-nighters begging her mom to help her finish. She sighed and selected more than half the list and deleted it. If she was going to pull another all-nighter again, it would be beneficial to reduce the amount of work. "How about just the first, lets say...twenty. We'll make the scale models and then go from there."

Zeke raised an eyebrow. "Right. How about," he pulled the laptop closer, clicking a few keys before turning the screen back to Tina, "We take the biggest and smallest moons and make scale models out of different mediums to compare and contrast their size. That way we each have only one moon to write about and I _finally_ get to live my dream of making a moon out of cheese."

"You're gonna stick me with Ganymede, aren't you?" she sighed as she watched him minimize all the windows open on her laptop in favor of opening Netflix.

"Well," he shrugged, "you're the writer." He bumped her shoulder with his own. "Can we get some fries, Mister B?" He yelled back to Bob manning the grill in the back. Tina sighed. This was the ritual. Even without Jimmy present it was the same - brainstorm, compromise, fries, The Walking Dead.


	2. Behind Closed Doors (not as dirty as it sounds) (promise)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _She was used to being boy crazy - she had written about every boy in school - but Zeke? Zeke was always that super annoying guy that was a tag-along when her and Jimmy were hanging out. Zeke was the last person on her list for when the world ended. He was her best friend’s best friend. He was an afterthought._

The next few days seemed like a blur. Everyday was the same routine: School, Reflections, home, work (also known as: The Restaurant; also known as: the time and place where most of the project got done), coffee and The Walking Dead with Zeke. Alone time with Zeke was a new experience. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Tina was just used to Jimmy being the buffer. She liked getting to know new things about him, though. Like the fact that he’d seen every single episode of The Simpsons at least twenty times or that he played guitar. The latter peaked had Gene’s interest - ever since Zeke had shown up to the restaurant with an acoustic guitar strapped to his back, Gene had been constantly pestering him to start a band.

_“Come on! Our band name could be Two Dudes with ‘Tudes! Mullet Brothers! Middle School Drop Outs! Gene & Gene!”_

_“Not Gene & Zeke?”_

_“Gene sounds better than Zeke, it rolls off the tongue!”_

All of Gene’s begging was for naught, however, especially when Tina glared at him for distracting them from finishing their ball-of-yarn moons. So far they had made their moons out of the aforementioned yarn, newspaper, and tissue. Currently, with the help of a calculator, they were in the process of figuring out how many marbles to put in fish tank moons to simulate the masses of each. This was not boding well for Tina - who kept coming up with different answers each time. At one point, she had more marbles for Deimos than Ganymede - which definitely was not right.

Seeing her frustration, Zeke sighed. “How about we just do this,” he took a handful of marbles and dropped them in the smaller fish bowl. In the bigger fishbowl he dropped in five handfuls. “and if Ms. Sanderson calls our bluff on our calculations, we’ll just take the hit.”

Begrudgingly, Tina agreed. “Fine, but I’m telling her that you came up with the marble idea in the first place.”

Zeke shrugged. It wasn’t entirely a lie, he had suggested filling the bowls with M&M’s. Tina had been the one to suggest something less chocolate-y and melt-y.

“You staying for dinner again, hun?” Linda asked, suddenly appearing at the table. “We’re having meat loaf.”

“Sure! Thanks Mrs. B!”

Zeke had stayed for dinner the past two nights - supposedly because his parents were out of town but Tina had her suspicions. For whatever reason, talk of Zeke’s home life was generally off limits. Even asking about the fish elicited a death glare. Although, she assumed that if his parents were really out of town, he would have no problem leaving at the end of the night to go across the street to Jimmy’s to eat leftover pizza. She had considered asking him about it, but the more time she spent with Zeke the more she realized she like him happy and not broody.

They cleaned up their mess in the restaurant, carrying the new moons upstairs to Tina’s room, before joining everybody in the kitchen for dinner. Linda asked how school was going, Louise complained about her History teacher (_“He talks so slow I wanna kill myself!!”_), Gene asked Zeke about the band (_“How about Pit Stains?!”_), and Bob asked about the meatloaf. Typical night in the Belcher household, and yet Tina could not stop looking at Zeke. She was used to being boy crazy - she had written about every boy in school - but Zeke? Zeke was always that super annoying guy that was a tag-along when her and Jimmy were hanging out. Zeke was the last person on her list for when the world ended. He was her best friend’s _best friend_. He was an afterthought. But now... now she noticed his laugh when Louise said something funny and how it was different than when he would laugh just to appease Jimmy; the way he smiled when he talked about music with Gene; the way the hair on her arm tingled when his hand brushed hers.

“Earth to Tina!” Zeke waved a hand in front of her face, snapping her out of her very dangerous thoughts. “We gonna go watch TWD or what?”

“Umm, yeah.” Suddenly the thought of being alone with Zeke was making her palms sweaty, but she wasn’t going to tell _him_ that. Honestly, this was all probably just a product of one-on-one time for the past four days. It would pass.

After clearing up the dishes and waving off her parents playful bickering about the two of them going to her room _(“Make sure you leave the door open!!” “Oh Bob, stop! We can trust our Tina!”_), Tina and Zeke made their way down the hallway. She closed the door behind them, eliciting a smirk from Zeke - and a flip flop of Tina’s stomach. He made himself comfortable on her bed as she grabbed her laptop from her desk. The minute she sat next to him, she regretted it. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized they had never sat that close, that intimate, before. The last two nights they watched Netflix in the living room surrounded by her noisy family. Tonight it was just them and she was eager, desperate, to think about anything else.

Tina took a deep breath, closing the lid of the laptop and setting it aside before Zeke could navigate through all her open windows. “So tell me, why don’t you want to go home?”

“Wow T-Bird,” he said, dejected, “if you wanted me to leave all you had to do was say so.” He made a move to get up but Tina grabbed his arm to stop him.

“No, I mean, you’re always staying for dinner and we end up watching The Walking Dead until everyone’s asleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always up for a zombie marathon, but we both know you’re delaying going home and I’m just curious.”

Zeke steeled his jaw, which Tina knew was a sign that he didn’t want to talk about it but she also wasn’t going to stop asking until she got a straight answer from him. “Maybe I don’t want to go home to an empty house,” he answered quietly.

Normally Tina would have accepted this answer and moved on, but his body language was saying that there was more to the story and her curiosity was getting to the better of her. Plus moving on meant that she would have to give in and sit closer to him, breathing in his cologne, while they shared a laptop screen. So she doubled down. “The truth.”

He took a deep breath and stood up. Tina thought for sure he was getting ready to walk out the door, but he just ran a hand through his hair and started pacing the room. Her eyes followed him as he walked back and forth, making her almost regret summoning broody Zeke. She was just about to give up and tell him to forget about it when he stopped pacing the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Things are bad at home, Tina,” he said, quietly.

“Aren’t they always?”

“Not like this,” Zeke sighed, standing up again. “I’ve been sleeping in my car at night, not even JJ knows.”

Tina hesitated, thinking it better not to interrupt. For Zeke to tell her something that he hadn’t even told Jimmy was big and she didn’t want to jeopardize that.

“Cheryl left.” He started pacing again, digging his hands into his pockets. “All my dad is drink, yell, throw things, and drink some more.” He sat down on the bed next to Tina again, who had started chewing on her bottom lip.

“Has he-”

Zeke interrupted her, as if he was reading her mind. “No. Though I’m not really home enough to be used as target practice so who knows.” He shrugged.

Tina let out a deep sigh and stood up. “Come on,” she grabbed his hand to pull him up. She led him to the window, “We’re gonna go for a walk. Then we’re gonna come back and watch The Walking Dead and you’re gonna have a slumber party with Gene tonight.”

“Tina...” he started, following her out the window.

She turned to face him when they were both on the roof. “We’re going to go for a walk,” she repeated, slower this time. “You’re going to listen to what I have to say. I’m going to give you a sleeping bag and you’re going to sleep in Gene’s room tonight.” She knew that he thought she was offering him a place to sleep out of pity and that was only partly true. Zeke had trusted her with something he hadn’t told anybody else and she wanted to prove to him that he hadn’t made a mistake. She wanted to prove herself worthy of his trust. She wanted to prove herself worthy of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make my heart burst. Spoiler alert for the next chapter: it makes my heart full. Also let me know if you're interested in a playlist. (Also I know nothing about space, this will probably become evident in the future.)

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in years. I'm a sucker for tropes and how into Tina Zeke is. Comments are welcome and loved! I'm going to try to update this as much as I can. The rating might change in the future, I haven't decided yet. Also super sorry for a boring first chapter, but laying groundwork is important I guess.


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